Alisher Usmanov, Uzbek billionaire, wants to buy the Arsenal Football Club. British bloggers began exposing his apparent sleazy, violent past. He retaliated by getting their sites thrown off their servers. This includes the site of Craig Murray, former UK Amabassabor to Uzbekistan. Chicken Yoghurt has the full details of what has now become a major issue in British blogdom.

Some of Murray’s relevant posts are now on UK IndyMedia until he gets his site running again.

An excerpt from one of Murray’s posts.

Alisher Usmanov, potential Arsenal chairman, is a vicious thug, criminal, racketeer, heroin trafficker and accused rapist.

From The Nether-World (read the original, it has copious links to other articles)

Suffice to say that Alisher Usmanov is close to Islom Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan (ally of the UK and USA) who gets his kicks from having his subjects raped with broken bottles or boiled to death. Given Alisher Usmanov and his legal team’s enthusiasm for bullying anyone who has anything less than flattering to say about this wonderful person, I won’t go into the allegations of criminality reported by sources far more reliable than Schillings [their law firm]. For now I’ll just lament the apparent introduction of Uzbekistan’s interpretation of the concept of freedom of speech here in the UK and wonder how this will affect a great British institution like Arsenal football club.